Harpers Ferry America the Beautiful Quarter

The 2016 Harpers Ferry America the Beautiful Quarter will be the third 2016 strike of the United States Mint America the Beautiful Quarters™ Program. This program encompasses 56 new quarters issued over eleven years starting in 2010 with this Harpers Ferry coin being number thirty-three.

No one will know for sure what the Harper’s Ferry Quarter will look like until early in the year of which it will be struck. This is because the Mint typically does not release final designs until shortly before the coins are to be released. Design candidates, however, will appear sometime in 2015 for review by the appropriate parties such as the Citizen’s Coinage Advisory Committee and the Commission of Fine Arts.

Since the Harpers Ferry coin is the third one to be released that year, it will actually be preceded by strikes honoring Shawnee National Forest of Illinois and Cumberland Gap National Historical Park of Kentucky. Following it will be quarters for Theodore Roosevelt National Park of North Dakota and Fort Moultrie (Fort Sumter National Monument) of South Carolina.

Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park of West Virginia

Scenery is not the only thing that Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in in West Virginia has to offer as it also has a rich history.

Located on the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the Park is only 50 miles from the nation’s capital. The town around which the Park is located was named after Robert Harper who operated a ferry service on the river.

In later years, the town would serve as a federal armory (in fact Meriwether Lewis outfitted the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition here) which was overtaken by a group led by Abolitionist John Brown in what was known as John Brown’s raid. He meant to arm the slaves to fight for freedom in 1859, but failed and was hung.

An interesting Civil War note, Harpers Ferry was such a strategic location that is changed hands 8 times during the war.

For those who like to hop from state to state, the Appalachian Trail actually runs through Harper’s Ferry making it possible to walk from the town, which is located in West Virginia, to Maryland in only a few minutes.